UNLV Law Blog

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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Professor Nancy Rapoport’s Paper Listed on SSRN Top Ten Download List

In August, Gordon Silver Professor of Law Nancy B. Rapoport’s paper, Rethinking U.S. Legal Education: No More ‘Same Old, Same Old’, was listed on the Social Science Research Network’s (SSRN) Top Ten download list for IRPN Subject Matter eJournals and Innovation Research & Policy Network.

As of Aug. 28, the paper was downloaded 170 times.

The paper’s abstract reads, “In this Essay, I suggest that we should think about how to create a curriculum that encourages students to develop a variety of skill sets. Law students simply don’t need three years of Socratic questioning regarding the fine details of court opinions. They need a wide range of experiences, preferably building on skill sets (like the twenty-six Berkeley factors) that effective lawyers have developed. A law school’s curriculum should have courses that focus on different factors in each year of law school. Ultimately, what we should be teaching law students is how to develop the judgment to advise clients. Teaching students how to think about the law is no longer – and probably never was – enough.”

Professor Rapoport's specialties are bankruptcy ethics, ethics in governance, and the depiction of lawyers in popular culture.